Ally McCoist has come to the aid of Scottish football this morning on English radio station TalkSport.
The ex-Rangers goalscoring legend has hit back at critics of the game up north after attacks on it from down south in the last few days.
Celtic’s elimination from the Champions League resulted in pundit Ian Abrahams launching an attack on the Scottish game. Abrahams, also known as “Moose” stated the Premiership should be re-named the “Scottish Pub League”.
McCoist took exception to the comments, and stood up and praised the competitiveness of the league.
Fans have every right to be excited. All we’re saying is the league is stronger this year because the teams around Celtic have gotten stronger. We feel, and I include Kilmarnock in this who had a great season last year, Hearts, Hibs, Rangers, Aberdeen are all stronger. It’ll be a good league this season. Take that Moose!
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McCoist’s response was a decent defence of the Premiership, but it’s time more took a stand like him.
In England, Scottish football in consistently criticised as being worse than it really is. However, too many key figures in the Scottish game sit back and just listen to it.
We need more people like McCoist who are willing to stand up and defend the game the way it should.
Whilst the former Rangers striker was fairly calm about his response, a more furious Jim White took Abrahams to task yesterday on the same station.
White said it’s easy to see why Scottish fans were so happy to see England knocked out of the World Cup. The angry tone in his voice forced Abrahams to withdraw his pub league comment.
More top Scottish football figures must step up and defend the game also. There is a narrative in England that sees the Scottish Premiership as a lot poorer a standard than it is.
Should we just allow this to continue, that opinion is only going to grow stronger. This has a chance of then spreading to potential new signings from England. Players could end up seeing Scottish football as worse than it truly is and turn their back on it.
It’s time more legends and figures in Scotland stopped allowing this idea to fly around uncontested.
Whenever one Scottish figure defends the game, five more English critics seem to appear and laugh it off. We need a bigger effort from our heroes to debate and kill this nonsensical idea that our game is pub-league standard. It’s not just a slap in the face to the players of today, but to the legends who made their names in Scotland.
The game up in Scotland has given our senior figures so much. It’s time they came out and defended it.